As you can probably tell, I'm fascinated by the upswing in Democratic voter registration in states across the country (Acknowledging all the usual caveats, of course). For me, the larger question is not how this effects the 2008 Election, but what a shift that numbers of the millions might mean in regards to the nation's the long term political trends.

Unsurprisingly, I was intrigued by this piece from Rhodes Cook, which attempts to take a wide-angle view of these changes (bonus points for lots of charts):

In the 29 states (plus the District of Columbia) where voter affiliation is kept by party, the Democrats have scored perceptible gains since the presidential election of 2004 while the Republicans have suffered significant losses. To be specific, the number of registered Democrats in party registration states has grown by nearly 700,000 since President George W. Bush was reelected in November 2004, while the total of registered Republicans has declined by almost 1 million.

Rhodes acknowledges that this shift is occurring in a pool of 96 million registered, partisan voters, so lets temper some enthusiasm here. But as I've written about before, some of those shifts are occurring in some significant places -- in PA, with a shift of million voters to the Democratic column, for example.

There are also some important states for Democrats (particularly legislators) -- OH, MI, VA, MN and WI -- which don't require voters to identify with a party. And I don't think it's too much to assume that similar movement toward the Democratic party is occurring in these states as well.